distributed.net > Reviews > Distributed processing - Why not join in?

Author's product rating:   

Web site content	Good
Navigation	Excellent
Frequency of content update	Good,
Choice of FTP sites	Excellent
How fast is this website	Fast

Advantages:	Help science or help get stronger legal encryption
Disadvantages:	None

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

There are some problems far too large for any one person to solve. These problems may even be too big for 100 people with computers. Be a part of the largest computer on earth by joining distributed.net. This works by breaking up these large problems into lots of small bits, which individuals can solve by running a small program on their computer in the background. The program uses only bits of your computer which would otherwise not be used, to solve one of these small problems - problems which eventually make up the solution to the big problem. Two large problems are being solved at the moment, RC5 and OGR.

The RC5 challange aims to demonstrate how insecure legal encryption is, by cracking something encoded with an encryption 256 times stronger than what is legally exportable. There is a prize of 2000 US dollars for the owner of the computer that successfully solves this puzzle.

OGR concentrates on the search for Optimal Golomb Rulers, something which is discribed better than I could manage at http://www.distributed.net/ogr/ . OGR's have many uses in medicine and science, and the person who finds the most optimal Golomb Ruler may even end up with their name in the footnote of some obscure Science book.

There is no reason why you shouldn't join in and help. The program will not slow your computer down, and is available for every computer and operating system, from Amigas, PCs and Macs running Windows, Linux, MacOS or BSD.